Amazon refreshed its Kindle Fire HD tablet lineup today, by increasing screen quality and offering very low prices, as well as a brand new UI. The devices are 7.7 mm thin, they run Fire OS 5.0 and are priced below $150.
Fire HD comes in two versions, the HD 8 with an 8 inch screen and the HD 10 with a 10.1 inch display. Amazon opted for 16:9 aspects here, showing a focus on video for these models. The devices offer HD resolution and 400 nits of brightness, plus the use optical lamination. Inside the slates we find a 1.5 GHz quad core processor, 8 or 16 GB of storage on the HD 8, going up to 32 GB on the HD 10, plus a microSD card slot.
Dolby Audio speakers are also here, with Dolby virtual surround and Amazon opted for a plastic case for these devices, with a glossy approach. Fire OS 5 is based on Lollipop and gets a new home screen layout, with the default screen showing the recently accessed media at the top and apps at the bottom. If you swipe to the left or right you’ll go to dedicated media pages, like books, music, video or apps.
Another announcement brought us the cheaper Kindle Fire Tablet, priced at just $50 and packing a 7 inch IPS display with a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution, a quad core 1.3 GHz processor and 8 GB of storage. Fire HD models come from the end of the month and some more colourful versions will come at the end of October. There’s also a special Fire Kids Edition 7 inch model, with a robust case, content tailored for children and parental control.
Fire Kids comes on September 30 and European pricing is 120 euros. Fire HD 8 goes for $149.99, while the Fire HD 10 costs $229.99.
